I recently wrote a simple answering machine program/plugin for pidgin and someone asked me to port it to 32 bit. So I fired up pidgin within my virtual box installation at work (as I have only a 64 bit machine at home) but couldn’t get it to connect. Tried all sorts of methods found over the net of changing ports etc, set port forwarding in Virtual Box NAT, even switched to using a bridged host interface but still no go. On a whim, installed pidgin in the host, i.e., windows and still the same issue. Hmm, interesting.. But wait, gtalk client works, then what gives.
Greetings, Earthling 🖖
I’m Shantanu, aka Shaan.
Your friendly neighborhood co-inhabitant of this tiny speck of dust, I maintain this site as a stochastic log of my calculations towards the futile aim of weeding out the anomalies from the equation that gives me my “42”.
In my Clark Kent mode, I spend my day at The Trade Desk, trying to crunch through petabytes of data and trillions of queries every day to understand the human behavior and make the advertising technology world a little bit better.
Before that, I spent a couple of decades in the Semiconductors world at Qualcomm and Google, building processors and AI accelerators, tinkering with chips, operating systems, device drivers, human interface devices, security et al.
When the lights go out everywhere, I like to don my maker hat and build stuff that no one wants.
I like to make and break things around me ranging from my smart toaster/TV to my web and phone apps to my car, strumming a bit of guitar, 3d printing stuff, and of course, shit-posting on twitter @shantanugoel.
Sometimes I post some of my travel and 3d print outputs on instagram, because I’ve been told by my gen-z interns that that’s a thing to do.
Do check out some of the other subdomains that I run.
Apology For Bad Downloads
Guys, for the past few days if you downloaded any “.tar.gz” packages from this site (like my splert or shantz-xwinwrap tools), then you’d have got a corrupt package. Turns out there was some issue with mime-types with my setup. I haven’t been able to resolve it still but have re-upped the packages in “zip” format. Please download them again. I apologize for the inconvenience.
Shantz XWinWrap: The “Moving” Wallpaper Fun Continues
XWinWrap is a small utility written a loooong time ago that allowed you to stick most of the apps to your desktop background (Thanks to fsckin for introducing me to it). What this meant was you could use an animated screensaver (like glmatrix, electric sheep, etc) or even a movie, and use it as your wallpaper. But only one version of this app was released, and it had a few problems, like it wasn’t exactly “sticking” to the background and geometry option didn’t work as well.
Shantz XWinWrap
XWinWrap is a small utility written a loooong time ago that allowed you to stick most of the apps to your desktop background. What this meant was you could use an animated screensaver (like glmatrix, electric sheep, etc) or even a movie, and use it as your wallpaper. But only one version of this app was ever released, and it had a few problems, like:
Well, sticking didn’t work. So if you did a “minimize all” or “go to desktop” kind of thing, your “wallpaper” got minimized as well.
Do They Really Know How To Sell Something In India?
Update: UK Ad Authorities have declared iPhone ad as “misleading”. I guess then they should declare it plain fraud in India.
This is a short rant about two of the “big” products launched recently in India in the last one week and how the people behind their sales/marketing teams either try to take the Indian customer for a ride, or shaft themselves.
iPhone: The big icon. Bharti Airtel/Vodafone claimed lakhs of pre-registrations, yet no one lined up to buy it. Anyways, to the point. The ads all over the print, digital and broadcast media in India list out 3 major points in one sentence: